Spiders infest the Cookie Jar

LA SCREENINGS: Canada’s Cookie Jar Entertainment is here for the second time this year, offering up Hispanic rights to not only shows like Doodlebops and Gerald McBoing Boing but also a brand new toon for 2007.

Cookie Jar has partnered with the two Japanese companies behind animé hit Ghost in the Shell, production house Bee Train and Yomiko Advertising, to adapt the kids book series, Spider Riders, into a boys action series for 9-12 year-olds.

Written by Tedd Anasti and Patsy Cameron-Anasti, the story follows a 13-year-old boy who tunnels underground to the find a world where warriors ride on the backs on giant arachnids to defend their world of Arachnia against equally giant mutant insects.

“The series is in production and we’ll have the first episode ready to show in January 2006,” said Cookie Jar’s sales exec for Latin America, Olga Romero, from the company’s suite at the off-lot screenings at the Park Hyatt here in LA.

With 52 half-hours due to be delivered in 2007, the show will likely be Cookie Jar’s headline title at Mipcom, with the producers lining it up as the next Yu-Gi-Oh! and its predecessors like Pokémon. “It has a Western feel but the Japanese animé look,” said Romero.

In the meantime, Romero is looking to lift Cookie Jar’s relationships with the Lat-Am terrestrial channels, having already made inroads into the pan-regional Lat-Am cabsat channels such as Discovery Kids, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.

Discovery Kids has previously acquired Cookie Jar’s toons Calliou and Zoboomafoo; Cartoon Network Lat-Am has picked up The Little Lulu Show, Mona the Vampire and – airing since April – Arthur; and Nick has taken Afraid of the Dark and other library titles.

With new titles Gerald McBoing Boing, a copro with Classic Media, going to Cartoon Network US for an August debut, and Doodlebops going to Playhouse Disney in the US, Romero is also persuading their Lat-Am sister channels to follow suit.

“It’s about how the US product will work for the sister channels in the region; it’s so much more than TV these days but we have solid home entertainment and L&M partners in the region, such as Tycoon in Mexico and Playart in Brazil,” she said.

As for reaching into the Lat-Am free-TV terrestrials, Romero admitted it might be a long haul. “The question of how the free-to-air windows play out with the exclusive first-run windows is still being decided. And at the moment the terrestrials increasingly want to take on the L&M themselves,” she added.

Cookie Jar’s free-to-air business in the Lat-Am region currently amounts to Mona the Vampire and Zoboomafoo going to Mexico’s Canal Once with the latter also airing on TV Cultura in Brazil, both deals inherited from the Cinar era.